


Inversion of Control

by rillrill



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate universe - Silicon Valley, Business Rivalry, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Hate Sex, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-26
Updated: 2016-09-26
Packaged: 2018-08-17 11:26:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8142058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rillrill/pseuds/rillrill
Summary: A fiercely independent, technically-homeless renegade coder determined to disrupt the security and privacy industries. Her awful, self-made-billionaire, brimming-with-toxic-masculinity-but-secretly-cries-a-lot former boss.You'd think it wouldn't work, and ninety percent of the time, you'd be right.





	

**Author's Note:**

> _In software engineering, inversion of control (IoC) is a design principle in which custom-written portions of a computer program receive the flow of control from a generic framework._

**PROLOGUE: 2009**

There wasn't enough free coconut water in the world to warrant coming back here, but she did, anyway. Technically, Rey realized, when you're fired without warning, they should just pack your things up in a box and mail them to you. The walk of shame through the corridors of First Order Security, accompanied by a guard to swipe her through doors now that her own deactivated badge was useless, felt potent - even on a Saturday. That's the thing about those 60-hour workweeks, she thought as she swept ephemera from her desk into her backpack; the office was never really empty.

"Don't touch that," the guard said coldly as she reached around the back of her computer to turn it on, and Rey frowned.

"I've got files on there," she said, and the guard shook his head.

"No, you don't," he said. "As per company policy, your user account has been deactivated."

Stomach sinking. Head pounding from lack of sleep and caffeine. Rey chewed the inside of her cheek and shook her head as the realization set in. "Right, then," she said, feigning cheer as she dropped the one remaining signifier of humanity left at her desk, the sad cold brew bottle she'd soldered into a pencil holder herself, into the trash. "Well. Thanks for all your help, then."

Few heads turned to watch her leave, but she could feel their eyes following her anyway, darting from side to side beneath Ray-Ban frames and oversized, noise-canceling headphones. She knew the deal. Watching a colleague escorted out by security, their scant possessions from their desk tucked into a beat-up black Jansport - tale as old as time here. She knew what they were all thinking: What now? Why her? What'd she do?

As they passed the kitchen, Rey rolled her eyes, and she stuffed two boxes of coconut water into her backpack anyway.

 

The thing was, it shouldn't have been a fireable offense in the first place. Or, at least, it wouldn't have been, if she hadn't gone and opened her goddamn mouth to that reporter from Gizmodo.

Of course the software had bugs. That was her whole job - to find the bugs, to specifically attack the platform until she found an exploitable vulnerability. Then figure out how to fix it. Not an unusual job description; the Valley employed at least a hundred thousand hackers just like her. At least. A conservative estimate, probably.

"Because," she'd told the writer, over two lattes at Peet's, "the whole point is that First Order is supposed to be impenetrable. And what's the point of selling your platform as impenetrable if you've not got people on your side, trying everything the bad guys are, so that you can fix it before anyone else knows about it?" A simplistic explanation, the type she might give a child or a liberal arts major, but she figured she'd ought to err on the safe side. The writer described herself as a new hire; her byline mostly turned up celebrity gossip posts at Jezebel. She nodded along as Rey explained, in shallow breadth, the duties of her position. "So I go in, I fiddle around until I find something that - if it's not a full-blown leak, it's got potential to become one. And then I put on my engineering hat and figure out how to fix it."

The writer nodded. "And there are how many of you?"

"On our team? Ten or twenty," Rey said, sipping her coffee. "It's a smaller operation than you'd expect from a company whose literal mission statement is unbreachable security, but we've all been pulling double duty for a bit, as the board's been... well, you know," she said with a knowing wave of the hand.

"Right. The layoffs," said the writer. The reason they'd met to talk in the first place.

The writer adjusted her glasses, nodded assuringly, and Rey shrugged and pounded what was left of her latte.

“Well, I can’t speak for anyone but myself, of course,” she hedged. “And this is all supposed to be anonymous, isn’t it?”

“Of course.”

“Right, then,” she said. “Well, I can’t speak for the exact reason. But I think they’re trying to cull anyone with… doubts.”

“Doubts?”

“About the security of the platform, prior to the IPO,” she said. “I’m not saying they’re wrongful terminations, now. I mean, private company, you can fire anyone if you’ve got cause. But I think it’s interesting, who they’re firing.”

“Hm?”

Rey leaned forward, lowering her voice. “People like me, mostly. Which is why I’m hesitant to put my name on record. People whose jobs require an innate knowledge of what’s wrong with the platform. And… I don’t want to speak out of school.”

“All right, then,” said the reporter with a shrug, matching her tone. “Off the record. What do you think the common thread between the layoffs is?”

Rey shook her head, thinking it over. The common thread, it was clear, was dissent. Goddam fascist excuse for a company. Fall out of line with the leadership's weird ideology and you were donezo. But that answer wouldn’t fly, particularly if this ended up on the record after all - so she swallowed around the shape of the words in her mouth and pushed them out of mind. Instead, she searched her brain for a more acceptable answer, a less incendiary phrasing. “I think,” she said after a moment, “that it’s got a bit more to do with… knowing things about the platform’s weaknesses, and not being able to fix them yourself quickly enough that they stay private. There’s a lot of doubt going around on the back end here, y’know, but with the new government contract, and the Bank of America contract, and then the IPO coming up, nobody wants to be the one to raise their hand and speak up. It’s a fear-based environment, more than anything else.”

“Aha.” The reporter nodded. “And you?”

“What about me?” Rey frowned. “I’m a white hat. I find problems and I fix them, it’s all I do.”

“Are you afraid of being fired?”

 

The answer she gave then, of course, was no; that she was too valuable to the company, that she’d brought countless holes and vulnerabilities to her supervisors’ attention and fixed them, herself, without much fanfare. She tried to say it without giving much away, fudging the details of her position and department just a bit, concealing about half as much as she gave away. And yet here she was, on a Saturday morning, collecting her belongings from her cubicle at the back of the third floor. The piece had dropped on Thursday; she’d woken up to a voicemail on Friday, informing her that her contract had been terminated, that she ought not to come in that morning. And now, Saturday: dumping her stuff into her backpack, performing the walk of shame out through the sliding chrome-and-glass doors and trying not to make eye contact with any of her (now-former) coworkers. She gritted her teeth, ground her molars. No shame.

But shit, she wished she still had access to to those files.

Technically, the good stuff was on GitHub. She never worked on company property if she thought the code she was writing might have use elsewhere. But this algorithm — she’d tested it on First Order code, and it was fucking impenetrable. Failsafe. Even she couldn’t break through it, and she’d written the damn thing.

She’d saved maybe half of it on her own laptop, but even that wasn’t enough. Although, it occurred to her, there might be another way. Only way to know for sure was to try.

 

The coffee shop where she worked on weekends was teeming with customers, but Rey waited it out. She bought a Greek yogurt, and she found a single seat at the bar, before snapping on her noise-canceling headphones and plugging herself in. The odds that company security had actually terminated her user account by now — they had to be low, infinitesimally so. She knew that herself, had found it out the hard way. Curiosity led her to break into the server a few weeks ago, wondering whether the guy four cubes down had actually been terminated for keeping his dick pics in his company Dropbox folder or whether that was just an insidious rumor. Turned out, First Order didn’t immediately delete its employees user accounts, but kept them on the server for a few days after the fact — made sense, she thought, that HR would want a chance to review what they’d been working on, what sites they’d browsed on their downtime, what they kept on their drives. He hadn’t had anything particularly juicy on there, just a few emails expressing doubts about a recent project…

Rey frowned, trying to remember the steps she’d taken. _Concentrate. Do the work. You’ve got this._

Within half an hour, she was in — looking at her own user account from her personal laptop. They hadn’t even thought to disable it or turn it read-only. She found the algorithm, found the code she needed, and copied it into her own GitHub in thirty seconds.

Then — double-checking that she’d got it all, that she hadn’t missed a single tab or bracket — she deleted it. Permanently.

The algorithm was her own intellectual property; she’d never brought it to company attention. Rey repeated this thought over and over as she packed up her laptop and tossed her half-eaten yogurt in the direction of the trash bin. It didn’t belong to First Order any more than her daily to-do lists and Spotify playlists did. Just because she’d thought of it there, written it there, made it there, didn’t mean it was First Order IP. Hers to do with as she pleased, like everything else from here on out. And she felt, in that moment, an idea coming on.

Privacy. Privacy and security, that was the whole thing, that was what First Order promised its corporate and government customers. Firewalls, impenetrable data banking to keep top-secret information top-secret. Compliance assistance and on-call staff, 24/7. But the thing was — and Rey knew as well as anyone else at the company now — the platform had troubles. Serious troubles, if the mere act of expressing doubt was enough to get you fired. She thought it over as she drove.  
  
_What if you had an unbreakable lock? A safe that couldn’t be cracked? And what if, instead of just selling those locks to the government and the banks and the military, like First Order, you handed them out to anyone who wanted them? What if you could protect your own data and information with the same level of assurance as those corporations, but protect them_ from _the corporate interests instead? What if you could do it for free, or almost for free?_  
  
The NSA. Wiretapping. Zuckerberg. Corporations selling data to the highest bidder. And on the other hand, an algorithm. A really, really good algorithm, one that she couldn’t even break through herself. Sure, it wasn’t a sure bet. Maybe she’d discover a massive flaw, an obvious mistake, after a proper test and a few hours of application. Maybe she’d tell Finn to have at it and he’d bust through it in five minutes flat. But shit. She’d never know until she try.  
  
She rolled down the driver’s side window as she drove over the Golden Gate Bridge. The morning fog had yet to burn off, even as the numbers on her car radio’s clock rolled over to noon. It was due to be a foggy summer, chilly and unwelcoming and distinctly out of character for the ‘70s postcard version of California she’d come to consider her home. But then again, the fog wasn’t unfamiliar, either. It reminded her of home, of London. The gloomy morning weather typical of the Bay Area had surprised her upon relocating, but truth be told, she didn’t mind it at all. Things were going to be fine. Fired? Fine. Paltry severance package? Fine. Visa about to expire? She’d deal with that when she had the available brain RAM. She’d play it as it lay.

  
  
  
Poe Dameron’s garage smelled like motor oil and old sporting equipment, though it had held neither a car nor a collapsible basketball hoop since he’d bought it eight years prior. Rey, though, was pretty much used to it by then. The distinctly garage-like smell had long since been overtaken by the ozonic scent of electronics just on the cusp of overheating, and the fans that ran twenty-four hours a day only made the smell more omnipresent.  
  
Her bedroom, essentially a converted laundry room, led into the garage, separated only by a single door, which meant that she heard, smelled, and could practically taste everything that went on therein. Poe had bought the house, a single-family ranch home near the suburban edge of Palo Alto, with his buyout money from a photo-hosting startup he’d cofounded in 2004; in the ensuing years, he’d turned it into a hostel for his hacking collective, an Island of Misfit Coders, so to speak. And he let her live in the laundry room on the cheap, so she had no complaints. Given the nature of her job at First Order, she spent little time at the house, anyway, and by the time she normally got home, the garage was normally empty.  
  
That morning, though, she drove home through Palo Alto at a breakneck pace, her mind racing, all intentions of stopping by the grocery store or the library completely derailed by her new objective. Teeming with ideas, with inspiration. So she’d been fired — big fucking deal. It was nothing she couldn’t come back from, particularly with this algorithm in her back pocket. She parked in the driveway, behind Poe’s beat-up ‘80s Cadillac Seville, and flew up the front walkway with her work possessions clanking and clacking against her Macbook Pro in her backpack. She took out the laptop, cradling it in her arm like one of Moses' two tablets, and dropped the backpack on the couch as she trotted through the rest of the house.

The idea wasn’t much more than a germ, a seed. But she could grow it.  
  
“Poe?” She leaned on the doorjamb of his open bedroom door, watched as he spun around in his desk chair, Finn rolling over where he was sprawled on his back on the king-sized mattress. They both looked up at her in vague interest, and Rey took a deep breath, gathering her wits, finding the thread of the mass of teeming thoughts and ideas jostling against each other in her messy, unorganized brain. 

“Hey. Guys. I, ah — I’ve got an idea.”

**Author's Note:**

> Here we fuckin' gooooooooooo!
> 
> Here be the dragons: hate sex, a justified and equal-footed rivalry, white hat/black hat dynamic, two people who really really hate each other who can't stay away from each other. If the ship makes you uncomfortable, you don't have to read it.
> 
> Additional tags and relationships will be added as the story progresses.


End file.
